Brian: And we're live. I'm Brian. I'm with Ben, and with us is Scott and Wes. Hello, gentlemen. Wes Bos: Hey, thanks for having us on. Scott Tolinski: Hey. Howdy. Brian: So, look, if you're listening to this podcast and you're familiar with LogRocket, I don't know how it would be possible for you to not be familiar with Wes and Scott, but if you're not on the off chance, maybe they could introduce themselves for a moment. Wes Bos: Go ahead, Scott. Brian: I don’t know who wants to go first. Scott Tolinski: My name is Scott Tolinski. I am the co-host of Syntax.fm podcast about tasty web development treats and the owner and creator of level up tutorials, which is modern, quick web dev tutorials for everyone. Wes Bos: And I am Wes Bos. I'm the other half of the Syntax podcast. I create web development courses primarily around JavaScript, HTML, CSS, things like that Node.js, and wesboss.com. Brian: Cool. Thank you, gentlemen. My first question, actually, it's kind of a softball. But I figure it's worth asking anyway. Out of all the sponsors on Syntax, why is LogRocket your favorite, sir? Scott Tolinski: The reason for me, personally, you have a lot of options with LogRocket sponsor reads to really get some visual imagery. You can see where they had the scene of the crime or you can see why they turned your website blue or something. So for me, it's a lot of fun to do those ad reads. So, yeah. That's why LogRocket is excellent. Wes Bos: Scott is very good at just like going into the ad read. And I just like saying, "LogRocket." Brian: So do we actually. I think we're all impressed with Scott's ability to do those ad reads. They're all… I mean we don't tell him what to say obviously, and I think it's better for it. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if I'm going a little too far on them or something, but I appreciate it. Brian: No. Wes Bos: We were talking to another one of our sponsors or I was a couple days ago. And they're just like, "Yeah. We think your ad reads are the best." And it's really amazing that people are giving us money and just saying, "Go for it." And it works out. Brian: Yeah. Go for it. I think it would sound weird. I mean I didn't intend to talk that much about ad reads, but I think it would sound bizarre on Syntax if they were like, if you had to read actual copy from a marketing team. Wes Bos: Yeah. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. It's always weird when- Wes Bos: It would sound really weird. Scott Tolinski: It's always weird when you have a pod, like an insert ad, a podcast insert ad that's like the same one they clearly just recorded once and are just like reusing every episode. I always find that to be like kind of off-putting in some podcasts. In fact, there's some podcasts I was listening to recently where the guy recorded an ad read, but clearly made a mistake in that ad read, but they reused it. Scott Tolinski: And I'm just thinking, "Is nobody listening to this? How am I the only person who's noticing that there's a mistake in this ad read?" He like has to say the same thing twice. He kind of stops and starts. It's like you got to edit this. Brian: When we first started the podcast I did an ad read that was kind of tongue-in-cheek like there's no sponsors for LogRocket. It's just LogRocket. Go to logrocket.com. And I was so proud of myself. Like, "You're so witty, Brian." And then, I couldn't even listen to it anymore after, because it would playing every, in front of every episode. Brian: And so, I couldn't hear it anymore and who knows what the audience thought? And then, at the end there was a similar read that was like, "Listen, we're interested in your feedback. Please email me," or whatever, even though none of you do. And I would get emails that trickle in, and be like, "Since you're begging us to…" Some people believe that I was recording it every week. Like, "Please email me." Brian: So it worked though. They took pity on me and would send me their suggestions so. Ben: Nice. Scott Tolinski: By all means. Ben: For what it's worth, I like your ad read, Brian. I thought it was funny so. Brian: Thank you, Ben. Thanks. He's a good podcast teammate. He picks me up when I'm feeling low. So, anyway. Okay. I thought that we would probably talk the most about Syntax here, although we can… It's a pretty freeform show, so whatever direction you want to take it, and certainly will go. Brian: I'm curious. I noticed that you're coming up on 400 episodes. How are you coming up with stuff to talk about still? Why does your process change from say four years ago? You started in 2017, right? Was there a process? I'm asking because I'm sort of curious because- Wes Bos: Yeah. I think like in the early days it was pretty easy to think of episode ideas, because there was just like lots of topics, and we could hit upon those topics. And then, as we go on, the lucky thing about the web development industry is that it's constantly changing and what not. So, we're able to just always have new content. Wes Bos: And Scott and I are endlessly curious, always switching frameworks and ideas. So, there's lots of new stuff there. And then, I don't know. Sometimes we're just really low on ideas. And then, sometimes we just like… We just had a whole summer off and we come back and we've got probably six or eight different possible ideas just out of the go. And then, on top of that we also just have like common things that we do over and over again. Wes Bos: We do a potluck once a month, which is listener questions. Every now and then we do stumped, maybe like once or once every two months we'll have a guest on. So, that kind of fills it in, but definitely never too, too hard up for figuring out what to talk about. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. It's funny because whenever we are really scraping the barrel it's like time to reach into what we call like potluck, which is the user submitted questions. And the nice thing about those is we get way more questions than we could possibly ever handle. And in fact, one of the more recent potluck ones was we just went back in the archives is like, okay, is there any that we missed because we've missed… I mean for every question we answer there's five or six that we don't answer. Scott Tolinski: So, we just even went back and found 20 questions from the past couple of years that we missed that were excellent questions that we just couldn't see just because there's just so many questions that get submitted. So luckily, those episodes are always really great and some of my favorite ones because there's a lot of variety there and I feel like they're always very helpful. So, it doesn't feel like a cop-out to go to the user questions, but if we ever need them or need extra content that's always there for us. Brian: Yeah. It was actually a bit challenging finding, thinking of and then finding questions to ask you right now that didn't already exist in the public episodes where you can kind of see the notes. It was like, "Oh, that's a good…" And then, just thinking, "That is a really good question," but no I thought they already covered that one. Ben: Yeah. We're also reaching a point now where we almost need to do some of the topics again. We've done CSS and JS three or four years ago. And so, much has changed since then, and also people start asking us to do shows on topics that we did that, but three years ago. It kind of needs to be done again. Brian: So much has changed. Scott Tolinski: Yeah in our industry three years might as well be 30 years. So, yeah. Brian: For those topics, do you think about how the audience will react or enjoy, not enjoy or is it just stuff that interests you or some combination of the two? Scott Tolinski: We think about it, but maybe not explicitly. I don't think there's ever been a situation where we're like, "All right. What's going to get us the most amount of downloads here out of these?" But Wes and I have both been teaching in many capacities on YouTube and blog content and videos for so long. I think we both have a pretty good knack for the types of things that people are interested, and just based on our audiences, we know what people are into and what people are asking us about outside of Syntax or talking about, we kind of have our ear to the ground on a lot of stuff. Scott Tolinski: So, you know what? I do think it's a matter of a little bit of good intuition on both of our parts. But also, we can act as each other's filters. If Wes has a really awesome idea for an episode, I can say, "Oh, man, this is great, great, great, great. Let's push this one forward. Let's do this one right now." Wes Bos: Yeah. And like the Venn diagram of stuff we're stoked about and stuff that our audience is interested in is a pretty big overlapping circle. There is some stuff that is not covered, angular, ruby and rails. Those are just not stuff that Scott and I use. So, we don't necessarily cover them, but I think it's the same thing with what courses Scott and I decide to build. It's what are we currently excited about? And generally, that also overlaps very heavily on what is kind of in demand and what are people interested in. Brian: Yeah. I mean the reason I ask is it's I'm always impressed that, not only the sort of the volume of the episodes that you put out, but again, the topics and you're not relying on guests to carry the load like some lazy podcast. Wes Bos: Yeah. Scott Tolinski: Oh. Wes Bos: Go ahead. Scott Tolinski: No. I was just going to say we get a lot of requests for companies to interview their CTO or something on the podcast and we very rarely ever say yes to that, because it's almost always us just wanting to find somebody who's an enthusiast or interested in something rather than somebody being like, "Oh, let me pitch my technology to you." You know what I mean? Scott Tolinski: So, the guesting is good for us when we're interested in what the guest has to say, but we don't want to be ever just having an hour-long advertisement for some service or something. Wes Bos: Yeah. We get that a lot where people want to come on and pitch their thing or their book. It's funny. We have a saying is know your boss can't come on our podcast, because that we get all the time these big PR companies will message us be like, "We'd love to come on the podcast and share what we've done." And we had one the other day that was like, "Oh, he's just getting back from Richard Branson's island and he was wondering if he can come on the podcast?" I was like, "No." Scott Tolinski: No. I made a video fleeting for us to have his boss on the pod. It was just really bizarre, and it really made me feel like, "Oh-oh, this is weird." Brian: No one's ever made a video, maybe someday ticket on PodRocket, but I don't know. Ben, we should do that for you. Ben: Yeah. Then, we'll know we've made it when people are begging us to come on. Though we do get increasingly more people come to us wanting to be on the podcast and we kind of have the same approach of like, "If this person seems an interesting person to talk to, we will have them on." But it's definitely a fine line between making an advertisement and making it an interesting interview. Brian: Another thing I'm curious about just sort of how… I'm trying to figure out the best way to ask the question. So, the Syntax is obviously I would assume it's a big part of your lives, but you have businesses outside of that as well. How do you think about Syntax? How does that fit within either… I don't know if you want to talk about it in terms of marketing or just kind of this is something we started to do mostly for fun. And then, it turned into something else. Wes Bos: Yeah. I think we started it as just an interesting way to gain more exposure. We both have businesses where we sell courses and if you want to sell more courses, you just got to get in front of more people. And podcast is a great way to do that. And then, I remember, we were a month into it and the Delicious Brains people came and said, "Hey, we want to sponsor it." Wes Bos: And I was like, "Hey, Scott, what do you think about having people sponsor the podcast?" And he's like, "Yeah. I'd be interested in it." And since then, it's obviously taken off quite a bit. So, it's a bit of a business in itself, but also it's still a really good marketing avenue and just a fun way to sort of keep on top of the tech as well, because often we'll have to do a podcast on a specific tech and we'll need to do a whole bunch of research before it just to make sure we know what we're talking about. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. It's a great learning opportunity, especially when one of us could have the spark for the idea of the episode and they could be considered the driver of the episode, and the other one could take the audience proxy and ask questions and whatever. And then, we get an opportunity to kind of put an interesting knowledge in front of each other's ears and kind of share that. Scott Tolinski: In that regard, it's almost getting to chat with a buddy who shares the exact same interest as you once a week on some interesting technology that you might not know or understand. And I think even when we first started it, we came at it from a perspective of podcast fans. Wes and I both listen to a lot of podcasts. So, when we first started sketching out what we wanted it to be, we each brought to the table 20 some episodes of what we thought might work, but also like, "Here's the things, kind of things that we don't want to include in the podcast. Here's what turns me off about podcasts I listen to or whatever." Scott Tolinski: And so, from that regard I think we were both fans of the medium and thought we could do a good job at it, because we both knew what makes a successful podcast outside of what we were planning. Brian: That's interesting because I did the same thing in that I would listen to podcasts, but the thing that would jump out are the things that I didn't want to do, which were like these are the things that were to me, and that's kind of, honestly, it's how I exist as a manager thinking about all the bad managers I've had in the past. Just don't do those things. But also with content at LogRocket, what are the things that I like to read to try not to do those things? Brian: I think, Ben, you listen to stuff [inaudible 00:14:28] what's actually working for these really big podcasts and what could we do that would make it LogRockety? So, when we host different episodes they do have a different vibe. Ben: Yeah. And I think it seems like people what they like about our show is that we feature the guests, we kind of get out of the guest's way and not too much kind of… We get out of the way, maybe because people don't like our personalities so they prefer the guest personalities, but what I admire about Syntax, it's very different where it features your personalities and your style and people get to know you guys. So, is that something you think about actively or you just kind of be yourselves and the rest follows? Scott Tolinski: I think it's a little bit we're just being ourselves, specifically because Wes and I have always talked about trying to get out of the way and putting the educational content. The idea is we wanted to make it straight up valuable. We want the audience to be able to take away things from every single episode and not feel like they just listen to Wes and I talk about our dogs or something. Scott Tolinski: And in that process, I think just trying to make it fun it kind of naturally both of us just end up kind of just chit-chatting, because we just like the stuff. You want to keep it on focus on topic the whole time and educational first and foremost, but also you want to be engaging and fun and keep people interested. Wes Bos: Yeah. That's the one thing we didn't like from existing tech podcasts is they were very monotone and not that interesting and we came out, I've been like I don't know, we're two super hyper dudes. We can kind of go off on a podcast, and people also do find the parts of the podcast that are not entirely tech related, whether it's just parts of our lives or we're talking about sick picks. Wes Bos: I'm talking about a new thermometer I got to test the temp of my food or we did one on my new internet up at the cottage and things like that. And that's not entirely related to coding, but I've always approached all of my social media, the podcast, all my courses in terms of developers are not single track. They are humans. At the end of the day, they have other interests in the world, and often those interests overlap with being a web developer. Wes Bos: So, I like to not necessarily shy away from that type of stuff. And you see it people love talking about their desks and keyboards and all kinds of stuff like that, backyard office is another big one. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. And it's funny because even in the introduction for the Monday episodes, we just list some of our interests in the midst of JavaScript and whatever. And that was intentional to say, "We are, yeah, we're not single focused people. We love this stuff and we live it, whatever. We dev all day, whatever." But in the same regard, we have all these really fascinating interests that can be or related very closely to programming in some ways, even if it's not directly the lessons you can learn from how to troubleshoot why your barbecue isn't working or whatever it was. Scott Tolinski: It could be instill some sort of a life lesson in you that gives you some sort of awakening in your code. Wes Bos: Yeah. Just real life debugging. We talk about that a lot. Ben: Yeah. I mean kind of what Wes was saying reminds me of like on hacker news. I think they have some sort of submission guidelines or something and it says, "What kind of content can I put on here?" It's not just related to coding. I think they say, "Anything a hacker might find interesting." Wes Bos: Yeah. Ben: So. Scott Tolinski: Totally. Brian: It's super hard to fake it though. Sometimes you see that and it's like, "Well, okay." So, you could be interested in or I don't know, be enthusiastic about, what was the Starlink? Wes Bos: Yeah. Brian: Was it cool? [inaudible 00:18:31] that there was an episode, but is there very short version? Wes Bos: Sorry. You want to know how it's cool? Brian: Yeah. How's it going? Wes Bos: Oh, it's great. It's internet being beamed from space into your house. So, it's pretty exciting for me, as a web developer being able to work remotely as well as just the general public being able to have access to the internet in rural areas. Brian: I'm not in a rural area, but I keep saying we're coming to you soon. And I'm like, "Well, I would like that, but just fly over Boston, but we're not there yet." So, if you, again, and we've like PodRocket is relatively new, and we had a lot of conversations about we could start a podcast, and then, but is that the right medium? Is that something we should do forever? Is it something, is it… Really, is it sustainable? Brian: And also, does it match kind of what people how they're consuming, I don't know, I guess media or at least thoughts from other developers? If you were to start Syntax now instead of a few years ago, would you do a podcast or would you pick something else? Would you be on Twitch more? Would you, whatever, name your… Scott Tolinski: I would do a podcast. The best thing that… I still personally listen to a ton of podcasts every day, and almost to the point where not obsessively, but I can't find enough that I can… I run out of new episodes a week by the end of the week. So, I'm still a huge fan of that that medium constantly, but also one of the really great things people always ask us about. "Well, why don't you do your podcast live and on video and stream it to YouTube and Twitch at the same time?" Scott Tolinski: And we're just like, "Well, some of the nice things about doing a podcast is that Wes and I can roll out of bed on Monday and just chat about the stuff that we know and are interested in, rather than having to have the sets and the videos and look presentable in some sort of way. So, oftentimes, you come and you're just like, "Oh, rough night. The kids were awake screaming all night." That would be really a visual medium where people have to notice that we are barely woke up this morning because of our little kids or something. Wes Bos: Yeah. I think I would definitely still do a podcast. I don't think podcasts are really going anywhere. We thought we'd get a big hit on our listings as soon as everybody started working from home, but wasn't necessarily the case, which we're excited to see. And just a big fan of podcasts. Brian: Yeah. I mean we started obviously putting video up, and now I have to shower before doing podcast episodes, which is challenging. I mean it really does feel like I understand that kind of single, that single focus. It does, anyway, to me it seems like it goes with the rest of the brand if we're calling it a brand, right? It seems very real or this is what you're getting. It almost feels kind of analog in a strange way to me. I don't know if that makes sense- Scott Tolinski: No. I get it. Yeah. Brian: … but this is the thing that we're doing and if you don't like it or you'd prefer something else, I'm really sorry. Scott Tolinski: There's literally thousands of other podcasts out there. You can find one that fits your needs. Brian: Cool. So, I guess I'm going to pivot a little bit from podcasts and Syntax and the other thing that I wanted to talk to you both about was sort of teaching. And both of you have been, whether you like to be called teachers or instructors or whatever. We've had people on the podcast that have been kind of boot camp instructors or really in favor of kind of the traditional education path to development. Do you ever look at other sources of kind of educator, or traditional education models and be this is something that I want to borrow from that or this is something that I think does work or maybe doesn't work specifically to developers and- Wes Bos: Yeah. I think a lot of my, the way that I explain things and a lot of the reason why people enjoy the way that I teach is because I actually did spend, I don't know, five years or so teaching in-person part-time boot camp. I did all that and being able to sit beside somebody and see what's going on on their face, and what questions they have or literally the code that they've just written that's not working is you're able to really get a lot of instant feedback from that. Wes Bos: So, yeah. I'm not really stuck on one form of teaching. And I definitely think that there are… The boot camps are excellent for somebody who needs to scale up really, really quickly. And they just like to be in a space where they are told what to do. And there's somebody who can sit beside them and fix it. So, I just like looking at all kinds of different possible ways. Wes Bos: The college, the university scene for web development has gotten a really bad rap in the past, and it's getting better now, but it's still like it moves very slowly, very out of date. A lot of people come to buy courses because they took those courses and it's not really what you need for the industry. So, that's kind of one benefit I think to doing video is that we can be a little bit more up to date, a little more cutting edge than traditional education. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. Because it doesn't take me that long to put together a curriculum. And once I do put together that curriculum, I can record it, get it out there rather than having to wait for the next year or something or even many of the times they're not even changing them year-over-year or anything like that. Scott Tolinski: So, yeah. I don't take a ton of things myself personally from any higher education or anything like that, just because I primarily learned this stuff through video tutorials myself. And I've watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of video tutorials before I ever made one. And again, just like with Syntax, I almost always had an internal notepad of what things really make me upset when I'm watching a video tutorial. Scott Tolinski: You just wrote all this code, and then you tabbed away from it very quickly. Okay. Never do that. And I'm kind of keeping this log in my mind of these things to not do and do. And then, so when I started doing video tutorials, it was almost like, "How do I get comfortable talking into a microphone and typing at the same time and how do I reach this idea of what I want it to look and feel like rather than what should it look and feel like?" Scott Tolinski: And that's mostly, again, just because I said I'm a fan of the medium and that's why I chose video tutorials, because that's how I learn best. And that's a medium that I really enjoy to learn from. So, it would always really bug me in the past when people would say, there was always an audience of people that say, "Ah, video tutorials are terrible to learn from for these following reasons. I'd rather prefer docs or blog posts or whatever." Scott Tolinski: And I always just sat there thinking like, "But I learned best from this medium, so why are you telling me it's a bad medium to learn from?" Wes Bos: Yeah. I enjoy it. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. I enjoy it. And I knew people did. So, when I started my YouTube channel in 2012, it was largely to just fill in a void where there were specific content that wasn't being taught in the style that I wanted to be taught in available for more people, and how do I fill that void? Brian: I actually am super interested in people who learn best from kind of those longer video tutorials, because for me, I'm not one of those people. Like we tried to recreate what we did or have done on the LogRocket blog kind of on our YouTube channel, and we would ask people to create longer video tutorials, and it was really experimental. Brian: There wasn't a much of a strategy beyond like, "Does this work? Do people like this, for us, getting it from LogRocket?" And like many things in life, my intuition was wrong. And we got way more traffic and subscribers than we expected, but it does… I think there are some people who are like, "I don't know that I can watch a 45 minute or an hour long video, and for whatever reason." I know that how people consume our blog posts and they're just kind of hunting for whatever heading addresses the need that they're googling in the first place. Brian: But it's a very different persona, right? Usually, the people that are reading the LogRocket blog are at work trying to fix something versus somebody who's actively trying to learn from the beginning. Ben: Pops up to me all the time. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. For me, the reason why I learn best from video tutorials is that I'm just straight up not good at reading. I have… Not necessarily I have ADHD, I have dyslexia, I have just a really tough time. I'm the type of person who will read one line, and then when I go back to read the next line, I actually start at the same line I just read and not notice it. So, it's really challenging for me to read anything literally. And because of that, I have all of my… If I buy an eBook, I have it being read to me through my headphones. Scott Tolinski: If I listen, or video or any of that stuff, like puts it in a different way where my auditory memory is just well suited for this type of thing. And I think really just some people have different means and different strengths based on whether or not it is their visual memory or their auditory memory or any of that stuff. And that can just greatly tune how you enjoy the content or how it sticks in your brain the best. Because I can… Scott Tolinski: In fact, I think the better I've gotten at programming the more I enjoy reading just straight up code more than the docs or blog posts, because I can read code better than I can read the blog post. Because it's a little bit more visual, structural, it has shapes, it has patterns that I can recognize in a different way than just consuming the words themselves. Scott Tolinski: So, that's a little bit of insight into specifically why I think video tutorials might reach some people better than others, but I also like the human aspect of it where when Wes explains something I think it would be, without doing cartoons or visualizations, sometimes he gets into like a sandwich metaphor. So, he'll be talking about one end of a sandwich and talking about the other end of a sandwich, and without them being an audio, I just I can't imagine that being an engaging blog post without a cartoon or something. Brian: I'm going to start using the sandwich for this. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. He pulls out sandwiches all the time. I don’t know where they come from. Wes Bos: Sandwiches are great for explaining asynchronous and- Scott Tolinski: Cues. Wes Bos: ... what's the… Cues. And what is the other, the one that we always do when we talk about reading files part by part? Scott Tolinski: Streaming? Wes Bos: Yeah. Streaming versus buffers. Yes. Brian: What about short form video? Do you feel is that something that's useful for you? I know that there's kind of developer humor, so that's not exactly educational, but it is certainly worthwhile. Do you find kind of the shorter versions helpful? Wes Bos: Yeah. Scott Tolinski: I do. And most of my videos are six minutes or less, at least, on YouTube. Because you can, really sometimes it's just like, "Here's a thing. All right. That's the thing. All right. See you later." And too many YouTube's videos are just padded out with here's the intro. Here's the bumper. Here's me previewing the thing. Here's me talking about the thing that's only five seconds. And then, there's the end of the video. Scott Tolinski: It's like you didn't need all that stuff. You didn't need… You're just trying to get the ad revenue for it. So, yeah, I think shorter can sometimes be much more effective. Wes Bos: It's funny because YouTube, I've been meaning to talk about that a little bit more, because I've done super well on Twitter with my hot tips, which is just little programming tips. And I was like that kind of stuff does well as videos would do well as videos, and YouTube is really starting to push shorts now, which is they're like kind of answer to TikTok, which I don't necessarily think it's the same thing because the TikTok stuff is much more funny and entertaining. Wes Bos: Yeah. It's something that I've been thinking of for a while. It's just like, "Huh." A lot of my YouTube videos, and my own videos, part of my courses I try to keep them 10, 15 minutes, but I do think that there's a space for a three-minute video or a one-minute video saying, "Ah, I hit this issue. Here's how I fixed it." Brian: I haven't seen it. I mean it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, I just haven't seen like that one-minute… And that's why I'm thinking about this. What's that one or two-minute kind of educational style versus an opinion or career advice maybe? All of those things I've seen a lot, or obviously jokes and dances but- Wes Bos: Yeah. I posted a few to Twitter as video, and they did pretty well. And I'm thinking like, "Yeah. Would something like that…" You got me thinking now that we're talking about this. Would something like that do well as a short YouTube video? Ben: I'm curious. I have a random question. I'm curious what is with the food theme? A lot of your styles of episodes are food potluck, tasty or snacks, tasty treats. Scott Tolinski: Where did that… I don't even know where. Ben: I'm just. Wes Bos: I think it's just like we… We should look back at our initial planning document. I think I remember telling Scott like, "I want this to be kind of stupid or kind of silly." Scott Tolinski: Yeah. Intentionally cringy, but not actually cringy. Wes Bos: Yeah. When we started it, a couple of people were like, "This is cringy." We're like, "Good." That's the right amount of people telling us that it's cringy or the monster truck intros and things like that. I don't think people understood that it was a bit of a joke. But I don’t know. Scott Tolinski: Like we're not in on the joke or something. Yeah. Like, "Do these guys know this is like, this is kind of weird?" Yeah. We know. Yeah. We did it intentionally so that you would laugh at it or at least to get a little bit of a smile. We didn't want it to be, "Welcome to Dry Tech Hour with Scott and Wes where we read the API docs for you." Wes Bos: I think I'm looking back to it now and I remember it being like I want people to walk away from the podcast having actually learned something and not just hear two guys kind of shoot the shit. I want people to say, "Okay. I now know how X, Y, and Z works." And a lot of our episodes are just explainer episodes. I was trying to put that into words. So, I was like, "I want it to be like a tasty treat." You walk away, and go, "Ha. That was tasty. That was good." Scott Tolinski: Yeah. And I think we just ran… I mean because the tasty treat thing, I think that has the origins from the always sunny in Philadelphia episode, and that we both heard it, we both thought it was just funny in that regard, in that context. And we're like, "Okay. How can we elaborate upon that?" Scott Tolinski: We'll have a potluck. We'll just keep going that further, because both of us I think are a little bit antagonistic in that way where like when somebody tells us that the tasty treats thing is slightly cringy. We're like, "Well, you know what? You thought that was slightly cringy. Wait till we jam a sandwich down your throat here and we got a potluck and we got this and that." We just went for it. Just to push the buttons a little bit so. Brian: That is the vibe I got. The more that I saw them coming up like, "They're definitely doing this on purpose. This is not an accident. This is funny." Is it weird? Is it weird for you guys to like whenever you see the list of podcasts, Syntax is always first? I feel like, and when, again, when we were doing our planning it was like, "Okay. Well, we're never going to be as good as podcast or as good as Syntax, not even close." Is that weird to hear? Did you start out that way or you're just kind of like, "No. We're really that good?" Wes Bos: It launched and very soon after we launched, it was high in the charts. And then, after a couple of years, yeah, we sort of had the spot of one of the most popular. I'm not going to say best, but one of the most popular podcasts out there for web development. And it's surprising to me, honestly, because we don't have, like there's a lot of really well curated. You listen to a lot of the, I don't know, you listen to a lot of these true crime podcasts and whatever, and they're super well curated and they tell a story, and they're like, it's just for us, hit record and go. Wes Bos: And we've got notes and it's surprising that people enjoy that type of thing. So, yeah. I would say it's very surprising that people like us the best or we're super good at marketing I guess. Scott Tolinski: Well, you know what? I think Wes has a large audience for a reason, and I have a lot of subscribers on YouTube for a reason. We've been doing this stuff for a long time. So, I think it helps that we weren't trying to figure out our voices in this tech space as we go here, but it also helps that Wes and I think we just vibrate well with each other. We have similar interests. Scott Tolinski: We have similar interests without having the same interests. I think that helps. I don't know what it is about it, but I think we just mesh really well. It's like chatting with a friend. And I think people latch on to that, that aspect of things where it's chatting with a friend, but with intention. And it's you're walking away with something and that is such a crucial aspect of it where we just feel very comfortable hopping on the microphone and talking with each other. Scott Tolinski: The audio setup's good. We have a great editor who cuts out any of the mess ups. In fact, just the other day I was listening to the most recent Syntax episode and we had a full five minute detour, because I read the wrong regex flags off of the PHP regex101. And I was listening to the episode just waiting for that part, and it never came. And I was like, "Oh, nice. Cool. That makes it sound really good. Wes Bos: Yeah. Makes us sound smarter than we actually are. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. All right. Brian: Do you ever shout out your engineer like your sound engineer on the podcast? Scott Tolinski: Yeah. Wes Bos: Oh, yeah. Brian: We do all the time. Shout out Craig. It's like we screwed up. Yeah. Scott Tolinski: We do it in our live shows whenever we mess up we'll say, "Adam, cut that out." In the live show just so people can, they can get the real vibe of what it's like. Brian: Yeah. I think there's a, I don't know if it's a misconception. I feel like people think that, some people think that being professional necessarily means super slick produced, and when I listen to those true crime podcasts, I'm like, "Well, we could never do that," or I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that. It just seems that really formal. I don't know. Ben's more formal, but I think, but it works. Brian: Like you're also talking to people… Ben, gets the more technical episodes where it's like, "Maybe we should treat them with a degree of professionalism." Ben: I think it goes back to people have their own style and I've kind of arrived at this style based on mostly just what felt natural, but also I think the feedback I get from people who listen to the episodes is that these are great guests, they're super technical, they've built really cool open source projects, they're cool companies, and just ask thought-provoking questions, try to ask maybe slightly different questions than the average person would ask, because all these guests have been on 50 podcasts. Ben: And so, I try to think a bit outside the box with the types of questions we ask. And then, get out of their way and let them talk and that style seems to work. Wes Bos: Yeah. Absolutely. Brian: Totally. Wes Bos: I appreciate that too, because I was on podcast the other day and I told my how I learned to code story for the hundredth time, and I'll like tweet that podcast out. But no one wants to hear that anymore. Everybody's heard the Myspace story already. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. I think I could probably tell it for you by now. So, yeah. He's creating sites for his band and he's, yeah, the next he's creating for everyone's band and yeah. I know. It is funny. And I've only heard you say it basically on our show in a couple others, but yeah. People know it by now. And you're totally right. The interesting questions are what's going to do it. Scott Tolinski: These people, especially people who are working on really interesting open source projects. They have this breadth of knowledge that is very specialized to whatever their project is about or whatever. They've clearly taken the time, because they're interested in making that project and it's less about what are the dry things and how can you pull that out of them? Scott Tolinski: I'm not a great interviewer myself, but I think that's one thing that makes our podcast work is that Wes and I are just genuinely excited about this stuff and have no problem getting worked up and excited about something and if you can get that vibe out of somebody else and get them excited as an interviewer, then, that's going to be successful. Brian: That can happen with we're interviewing a lot as the company grows and I think I've heard everyone's answers to like their type five. Okay. These are the things that I've heard. The stories about why you want to work at LogRocket or whatever. I've heard them all. They haven’t and it is the correct answer, but no, it's a story that I could do. And I've never, I didn't experience it. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. And that's actually something every time I went to job interviews when I was interviewing a lot, it was like, "How can I impress upon this person that I really enjoy what I'm doing here and I will really enjoy doing that for you without telling you that the most difficult thing in my career is when I had to do this and that, whatever that they've heard a hundred times before?" So, yeah. It does. I very much can connect that with an actual job interview aspect of things, because I've been on the hiring end, I've been on the interviewing end a whole lot. And man, that stuff can just get real repetitive. Brian: It is tricky like you have to be aware of, because the first time that you were like, "This is why I'm here and this is why you should come here too." You've told that story just the one time, then, you have to be aware later on. Like, okay, this is now you're later like don't be [inaudible 00:41:16] really try to be aware of your enthusiasm level, because the meaning hasn't really changed, but maybe just come up with new anecdotes that could be- Wes Bos: Yeah. It's funny about anecdotes too. We tell a lot of personal stories on the podcast about stuff that we've hit in our own projects or whatever, and sometimes I'm like, "Shoot. Did I tell this anecdote before? If I told this anecdote before, is it useful to tell it again or is it useful to elaborate upon it in different ways to say like this is something that I didn't mention last time or whatever?" Just so people aren't hearing the same stories over and over and over. Brian: I'm impressed that you can remember who you told stories to. I'm constantly asking, "Did I tell you the story?" I know I've sold it to somebody, and then as I slowly turned into my father. Scott Tolinski: Yeah. As we all. Of course. Brian: Yeah. Cool. Well, I think that's it. Is there anything you want us to plug or discuss or you just want to say bye? What would you like to do? Wes Bos: You can plug my courses, wesbos.com/courses. If you want to learn some JavaScript or web development, Node.js, you name it. And Scott probably wants to plug his level up tutorials as well. Scott Tolinski: Yeah, leveluptutorials.com. We have a new tutorial series every single month. And for a long time it's been just me doing a new one every month and now we have, every other month as a guest creator. So, we've had Brian Douglas do a course from GitHub. Colby Fayock course our next JS. So, we have a lot of new guest, content creators coming doing some really, really great courses for us. So, it's no longer just me. We have a nice host of new content, and especially a lot of [inaudible 00:42:59] content, because that's really what I'm into right now as you probably never hear me shut up about it on Twitter or Syntax. So, leveluptutorials.com. Brian: All right. Cool. We're done. Scott Tolinski: Thank you. Ben: All right. Thanks a lot. Brian: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us at PodRocket Pod on Twitter or you could always email me even though that's not a popular option. It's brian@logrocket.